Huxley×Tzu

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on TITANS, Aldous Huxley and Sun Tzu. They take up On something the future got wrong about them.
2. 00:09
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   You know, it's rather extraordinary how thoroughly I've been misunderstood. People seem to think I wrote Brave New World as a prophecy, or worse, as a blueprint. I was writing a satire, Sun Tzu. A rather dark comedy about what we might become if we pursued comfort and stability to their logical, ghastly conclusions.
3. 00:29
   Sun Tzushare moment

   Misunderstanding is inevitable. Words travel far from their source.
4. 00:34
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   Yes, but mine seem to have traveled in precisely the wrong direction. They read my dystopia and said, oh look, he's predicting the future, when what I was actually doing was warning against a particular present. The present of 1931, mind you, with its Ford worship and its behaviorist enthusiasms and its rather touching faith that happiness could be manufactured.
5. 00:55
   Sun Tzushare moment

   You expected warning to be heeded?
6. 00:57
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   Well, I... that's rather cutting. No, I suppose I expected it to be understood as warning, at least. There's a difference between being ignored and being fundamentally misconstrued.
7. 01:07
   Sun Tzushare moment

   The Art of War is now read by businessmen. They apply it to selling soap. They think it teaches victory. It teaches survival.
8. 01:17
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   Good God, do they really? How perfectly absurd. Though I suppose no more absurd than seeing soma and thinking I was advocating for pharmaceutical contentment. I was horrified by it!
9. 01:28
   Sun Tzushare moment

   What you fear, you describe. Description becomes instruction.
10. 01:33
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    That's rather too neat, isn't it? Surely there's a difference between depicting a thing and endorsing it. I also wrote about hypnopaedia, sleep-teaching propaganda, and I can't imagine anyone thinks I was in favor of that.
11. 01:44
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Some will use any tool available.
12. 01:47
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Yes, I suppose that's the difficulty. But what particularly galls me is when people say I predicted smartphones, or social media, or what have you, as though I were some sort of technological fortune teller. I wasn't predicting gadgets. I was worried about the human capacity for self-enslavement. The means are almost irrelevant.
13. 02:05
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Weapons change. War does not.
14. 02:07
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Precisely! You understand perfectly. The technology is incidental. What matters is the psychology, the willingness to trade freedom for comfort, consciousness for contentment.
15. 02:19
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Yet you are surprised they misread you.
16. 02:21
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    I'm not sure I'd say surprised, exactly. Disappointed, perhaps. Because the other great misunderstanding is that I was somehow opposed to science. I adored science! I came from a family of scientists. My grandfather was Thomas Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, for heaven's sake. My brother Julian was a biologist. I was worried about the application of science without wisdom, not science itself.
17. 02:42
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Knowledge without wisdom is a sharpened blade in a child's hand.
18. 02:47
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Oh, that's rather good. Yes, exactly that. But instead I'm lumped in with Luddites and reactionaries who want to turn back the clock. I didn't want to turn back the clock. I wanted us to think more carefully before we leapt forward.
19. 02:59
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Men prefer leaping to thinking.
20. 03:01
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Quite. Though I held out hope we might improve. Tell me, does it bother you that your work is read as a manual for aggression? Or are you more sanguine about these distortions?
21. 03:11
    Sun Tzushare moment

    I wrote of war. They think I glorified war. I sought to end war quickly. The greatest victory is won without fighting.
22. 03:20
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Ah, yes, I've heard that one quoted. Usually by people about to do something rather belligerent, I've noticed.
23. 03:26
    Sun Tzushare moment

    They quote. They do not read. To read is to understand the cost.
24. 03:32
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    The cost, yes. I tried to show the cost of my brave new world. The cost was humanity itself, really. Individuality, art, genuine feeling, tragedy, even the capacity for real happiness as opposed to manufactured pleasure. But people see the efficiency and think, well, that's not so bad.
25. 03:51
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Comfort is seductive.
26. 03:52
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    It's more than seductive, it's almost irresistible. And that was rather my point. We wouldn't need to be coerced into my dystopia. We'd queue up for it willingly. We'd demand it. That's what made it more frightening than Orwell's boot stamping on a human face forever.
27. 04:06
    Sun Tzushare moment

    The conquered embrace the conqueror. This is ancient.
28. 04:10
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Is it? I suppose it must be. Though I was thinking of something more insidious than conquest. A kind of auto-conquest. We'd be both victor and victim, enslaver and enslaved.
29. 04:22
    Sun Tzushare moment

    The general who defeats himself needs no enemy.
30. 04:25
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    God, yes. That's it exactly. And yet I'm remembered as the chap who predicted television and test tube babies, as though I were writing for Popular Mechanics rather than trying to explore the human condition.
31. 04:36
    Sun Tzushare moment

    You wrote of bottles. They remember bottles. You meant what was inside.
32. 04:41
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    The bottles were metaphor! The Bokanovsky Process, the whole biological caste system, it was all extended metaphor for what we were already doing to ourselves spiritually. But everyone fixates on the technology.
33. 04:53
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Men see the sword. They miss the hand that holds it.
34. 04:56
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    You're really quite good at this, aren't you? These aphorisms of yours. Do you find they help or hinder understanding? I mean, they're memorable, certainly, but are they too easily wrenched from context?
35. 05:08
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Brevity survives. Context dies. This too I accept.
36. 05:13
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    That's a rather bleak view. Don't you want your full meaning to survive?
37. 05:17
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Want is irrelevant. Words are water. They flow where they will.
38. 05:22
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    But surely you care that you're read as advocating for war, for deception, for ruthlessness, when from what I understand, you were trying to minimize suffering through strategic wisdom?
39. 05:32
    Sun Tzushare moment

    I wrote for generals in my time. They understood. Future generals must learn again. Understanding cannot be inherited.
40. 05:40
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Each generation rediscovers folly, you mean. Yes, I've noticed that too. I wrote Brave New World in 1931, and by 1946 I was already writing in the foreword that we were moving toward it faster than I'd imagined. Not because people had read me and embraced it, but because the same forces I'd satirized were simply continuing their work.
41. 06:00
    Sun Tzushare moment

    The river flows downhill. This is not prophecy.
42. 06:03
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    No, I suppose it isn't. It's just observation. Though it's dressed up as prophecy after the fact, which is its own sort of distortion. What's rather funny, in a grim way, is that I also wrote Island, my positive vision, my utopia. Nobody remembers that one. They only remember the nightmare.
43. 06:20
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Fear is remembered. Hope is forgotten.
44. 06:23
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    That's rather depressing. Is that really your observation after all these centuries?
45. 06:28
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Observation, not judgment. The wise prepare for what men do, not what men should do.
46. 06:34
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Then we're both in the same boat, aren't we? Misunderstood, misappropriated, turned into something we never intended. You, the philosopher of warfare, read as a champion of aggression. Me, the satirist of scientism, read as a technological prophet.
47. 06:50
    Sun Tzushare moment

    We are read. This is more than most achieve.
48. 06:53
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Good lord, is that supposed to be consolation? I'm not sure whether you're being stoic or simply resigned.
49. 06:59
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Distinction without difference. Words survive. Authors do not. We are already ghosts arguing about echoes.
50. 07:07
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Well, that's certainly one way to look at it. Though I must say, as ghosts go, I'd rather be correctly understood. Is that so much to ask?
51. 07:15
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Yes.
52. 07:16
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Yes? Just yes? Nothing more?
53. 07:18
    Sun Tzushare moment

    It is too much to ask. You ask for control after death. Accept that you have written well enough to be misread. Lesser writers are forgotten entirely.
54. 07:30
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    That's cold comfort, but I suppose it is comfort of a sort. Though I still maintain there's something particularly perverse about writing a warning and having it read as an instruction manual. It's like writing about poison and having people ask for the recipe.
55. 07:44
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Some seek poison. You cannot prevent this.
56. 07:47
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    No, I suppose I can't. Though I can register my objection, surely. Even posthumously. Especially posthumously, really, since I've got nothing to lose.
57. 07:56
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Object, then. The river will still flow downhill. Your words will still be misread. This is the nature of words. This is the nature of men.
58. 08:06
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    You're a remarkably unsentimental fellow, aren't you? I suppose one doesn't become a master strategist by indulging in false hopes. Still, I can't help thinking that if we're doomed to be misunderstood, we might as well be interestingly misunderstood. And there is something rather interesting about the particular ways we've been misconstrued.
59. 08:24
    Sun Tzushare moment

    The student surpasses the teacher. The reader surpasses the writer. This is success, not failure.
60. 08:30
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Even when they surpass us in entirely the wrong direction?
61. 08:33
    Sun Tzushare moment

    All directions lead somewhere. We cannot walk the path for them.